A triple play environment is one in which a plurality of services is provided to a user over an Internet Protocol (IP) transmission medium. The plurality of services provided over such a service includes, but are not limited to, TV live, Video, Video on demand (VOD), mail, games, voice over IP (VOIP), Notification, chat, video conferencing etc.
Typically, each of these types of services is transmitted using a specific and well-defined protocol, as will be understood by a person skilled in the art. Each of the services also has typical bandwidth requirements, which must be allocated and provided in the triple play environment.
A problem which exists is that there is typically a limited amount of bandwidth available to service providers to provide services to the many user connected to the service. This is a consistent and common problem for all service providers. There is also a desire to provide a service at reasonable quality of service.
In a triple play environment a number of additional problems exists. Each of the different services provided is not aware of the other services being provided at the same time. This can mean conflicts occur in determining which services should receive bandwidth and which services are more important to the user than others. The gateway at the user end (the residential gateway) can become overloaded with services requiring transmission to an appropriate end device for the user at the same time. Alternatively for quality reasons some services do not work simultaneously for certain user account
With multiple services being provided over one network there can be conflicts in the different protocols used for each service (for example, HTTP, RTDP, SNMP, etc.) The quality of service (QOS) of say the TV live or VOD services can be impacted by the elements of other services, since the QOS is managed at the network level.
The session initiation Protocol (SIP) is one of the main protocols in an IMS or triple play environment and manages the creation, modification, termination, etc. of the session or services with one or more participants. SIP is text based, but has a number of failings when it comes to IMS type systems for example details of active sessions are not stored and as a result proxies cannot even determine whether a session is active or not.
The ability to customize services provided to a user and to provide multiple services which are not impacted by protocol conflicts are also desired by user and service provider alike.
Accordingly an object of the present invention is to provide a method of managing the provision of a service which overcomes at least some of the problems identified in the prior art.